How things look through an Oregonian's eyes

April 29, 2008

What is it about whales? And screaming people. I had plenty of time to ponder this question on the sunset dinner cruise that left yesterday from Maui's Lahaina harbor.

As memorialized in my You Tube video, you can hear our fellow passengers (and me) getting super-excited when some whales appeared close to the Pacific Whale Foundation boat.

Elvis and the Beatles probably didn't get more "oohs" and "ahs" when they came on stage. Yes, there's something about whales.

My philosophical self likes this notion: whales are like God. Mysterious, powerful, unseen. Usually hidden beneath the surface, once in a while one reveals itself and Wow! – the crowd goes wild. Praise whale!

There was even some magical thinking going on with the captain, who you can hear me chatting with. I asked her how we could get some tricks out of the whales, since a whole lot of dramatic breaching wasn't going on.

She told me that in her sixteen years of experience, the best way to see whales is to turn your camera off.

Actually, I'd been wondering the same thing, having just filmed many minutes of open ocean, interspersed with a few whale sightings. (My video has been edited to show the best ones.) But I resisted the temptation to turn off my Flip Video.

And just a few seconds after the captain spoke, bingo, the whale breached big time. So much for magical thinking.

Aside from the whales, another exciting image on the video shows me sipping my very first Mai Tai. The expression on my face is partly staged, but mostly real – because it took me a while to realize that I was supposed to stir the drink up.

All the alcohol must have been sitting on the top, because at first it seemed like a killer Mai Tai (not that I'd know, really, since this was my first). Guess this is one of those things experienced drinkers learn on the job.

We also got a kick out of the wedding party, who you'll see sitting on the bow area in front of us. The bride wore a formal white dress on her Maui sunset dinner cruise. Cool. She certainly stood out among the shorts and t-shirt crowd.

The music man was friendly and competent, though we could have done with fewer of his corny jokes during the whale sightings. Some silence might have been more appropriate when the divinities of the deep paid us a visit.

April 26, 2008

Any mildly-extreme sport that starts and ends at an expresso bar is right up our alley. That's one reason we enjoyed yesterday's outing at the Kapalua Resort's zipline adventure on Maui so much.

But naturally zipping was the main attraction. We'd never zipped before. If you don't know what it is, my four minute video will show you.

It's a kick. You hang on harnesses attached to what we were assured is a super-strong cable. Then you let yourself go from a platform and zip – the longest of the four courses being over 2000 feet.

In the video I only show two of the ziplines, the short practice course and the longest ending course, which soars over a beautiful valley.

After three zips, I felt experienced enough to hold my Flip Video camera in one hand for almost all of the last course. But when you near the landing platform zippers are supposed to hold on to a bar with two hands; hence, the sudden shot of the sky. (I broke the rule at the very end.)

Kapalua has parallel lines, so two people zip at the same time. On the last course I was paired with Amy, who was zipping as part of her training to work at the Kapalua Adventure Center.

Not surprisingly, she zipped way faster than I did. About halfway down I thought about leaning back (less air resistance) to see if I could catch up, but then I realized that given how much we were paying per second of zipping, I should be going as slow as possible to stretch out the experience.

Not as slow as Laurel, though. She was zipping so sedately at the end of the last course she stopped 20 feet from the platform. A rope was thrown to her so she could be towed in.

We were fortunate to just be one of three tourists on our zipline adventure, the other three zippers being staff in training. Rob, from North Carolina via New Zealand, was the other tourista. He's thinking of moving to Ashland, Oregon – an excellent idea, we told him.

This is a fun 2 ½ to 3 hour escapade for those who are (1) moderately adventurous and (2) moderately physically fit. The zipline course requires pretty good balance – not when you're zipping, but while you're on a ladder getting unhooked from the equipment.

I suspect the first practice tower is designed to weed out the excessively infirm right at the start. You walk up a swaying hanging board/rope bridge, then have to navigate some steep stairs while hanging onto your zipline gear.

It's not a big deal for most people. But I wonder why Kapalua doesn't assess the fitness of potential zippers before they get fitted into a harness and take a twenty-minute ride up to the Mountain Outpost.

Maybe the staff figure that if you want to slide on a cable for thousands of feet over a deep Maui valley, you're fit enough to do it.

April 24, 2008

Ah, the World Wide Web is wonderful. It lets me communicate, potentially at least, with some people on Maui that I have messages for.

--To the couple in the room next door: It was so nice to get to know you early this morning – through the loud cell phone conversations on your deck. I hope your mother is able to join you on Maui. Paying for her lodging if she springs for the airline ticket sounds fair. And good luck with finding a babysitter through the nanny hotline. Hopefully she'll keep your child quieter than you've been able to.

--To everyone else staying in our section of the resort: Are we the only ones who can read the resort rules? Which mentions quiet time from 10:30 pm to 8:00 am. And no cell phone conversations outside rooms. I realize that it's tough to keep kids quiet in Hawaii (or anywhere), but letting them outside at 6:30 am seriously interferes with my Maui mellow, which is heavily dependent on much sleeping and napping.

--To Maui residents: If you keep allowing condos and high rises to be built, eventually you're going to have zero natural island and 100% artificial ugliness. Like almost everywhere, including Oregon, I'm sure your local elected officials love property taxes and over-building. They're not going to stop this Maui madness on their own. You've got to vote them out before it's too late. Really. I've been coming here for over twenty years, and you're losing the reasons both locals and vacationers like us love this island.

--To restaurant owners: Here's a tip for generating increased profits. Have at least one decent vegetarian entrée on your menu. Lots of people are trying to eat healthier now. Plus, there are many steadfast vegetarians. But you wouldn't know it from the meat and seafood fare (and nothing else) that we see on your dinner menu before we walk away and take our credit card elsewhere.

--To a couple of beach goers: Guy #1, cigarettes don't disappear when they're snuffed out in the sand. Filters don't disintegrate. Kids will find them when they play in what their parents thought was pristine beach sand, until little Johnny cries out with a butt in his mouth, "Mommy, look what I found!" Guy #2, you're too obvious. Drinking coke after coke, then walking into the ocean up to your waist for just a minute before getting back on your towel – that's a pee-giveway. Be more subtle. My wife got creeped out and had to walk way down the beach before getting in the water.

--To the turtle botherers: How would you like it if someone followed you home and waited outside until you left, and they could start stalking you again? Sea turtles were here first. Tourists came later. Know your place. Diving down and peering into a turtle's rock crevice refuge after it surfaces to breathe isn't cool. It's tourist-dorky. Watch them from a generous distance. If they want to come see you, they will. (Bet: they won't.)

April 21, 2008

SNAFU is both a deeply philosophic acronym, and a pleasingly profane one. It's meaning, "Situation Normal: All Fucked Up" reflects the Buddhist reality that life is suffering.

Traveling from snowy Salem, Oregon to sunny Napili Bay, Hawaii yesterday, we can testify that SNAFU is fully operative in the cosmos.

Not that we needed any confirmation of that. It's just good to be reminded (albeit as infrequently as possible) that when everything is going right with life, that's an anomaly.

Laurel and I started off fine, waking up bright and early for a planned 6:45 am departure from home so we'd have time to get to the Portland airport well ahead of Hawaiian's 10:15 am flight to Maui. I'd checked the Hawaiian web site fairly late on Saturday night and saw that HA 39's schedule hadn't changed.

The thirty-six degree weather and snow worried us a bit. The white stuff wasn't sticking, though, so we had no trouble driving up I-5 in nicely sparse morning traffic.

That was the high point of our travel day. On our speedy way to the airport I'd been worrying that we'd have too much time to kill before our flight left. When we checked in, my worries proved to be justified.

Way justified.

The Hawaiian check-in guy at the first class counter (we'd splurged on an upgrade, having lots of Hawaiian Airlines miles) had been joking around with us. So when he said, "Your flight will be leaving a little late…at 2:20 pm" at first we both thought this was another attempt to be funny.

Except, it wasn't. Mechanical problems had delayed arrival of the plane until 4 am in the morning. So now the crew had to rest for eight hours, or whatever, due to some stupid FAA rule.

I thought, Hey, just give them a couple of cups of strong Kona coffee. Or some Benzedrine. Shoot them up with meth, I don't care. Just don't make me wait four more hours at the airport.

Which is what we ended up having to do, spending much of the time talking about how stupid it was (1) for us not to have phoned Hawaiian and checked if the flight was on time, and (2) for Hawaiian not to have contacted us when they knew many hours ahead of time that HA 39 was going to be significantly delayed.

Fortunately, the baggage claim area of the Portland Airport had some empty seating with no arm rests, making for a comfortable place to doze and read the Sunday paper. Also on the plus side: Hawaiian gave us two $9 vouchers for lunch, meaning we each got paid $2.25 an hour to sit around until 2:20 pm.

Since we were in first class, once we boarded I figured that our travel troubles were over and we could relax in the lap of airline luxury.

I started to tense up almost right away, however – as soon as the flight attendant handed out the meal menu. We could select three of five lunch items, only one of which was clearly composed of vegetable matter. A salad.

Before he got to us to take our orders I could hear another passenger using the "V" (vegetarian) word, and mumbled regrets/explanations from the flight attendant. All of which were repeated when he got to us.

I've never been able to understand why nice restaurants and first class airline chefs believe that every single main dish has to meatified. Not only that, in this case every single side dish aside from the salad was laced with animal flesh.

So the potatoes and rice were off limits, leaving us with a small salad and a few other dainty dishes while the peons back in coach were feasting on meatless spaghetti.

That was promised to me if any spaghettis were left over, but I ended up having to scrape up the last bits of a hummus plate to keep body and soul together while I stretched out in my expansive first class seat, feeling sorry for myself.

SNAFU'ing on, I left a half-full glass of guava juice on the platform between our seats while I napped. When I woke up, it took me quite a while to figure out why my right shoe was wet. Along with my hip bag that I'd put on the cabin floor.

Sticky sweetness offered up a clue.

Adding to my bad hip bag karma, inexplicably I left it sitting in its guava soaked splendor when we deplaned. It was only after we'd gotten halfway to baggage claim and I'd started to think of picking up the rental car when a little voice inside my head said, "Good luck, since you don't have a wallet."

Oh, fuck!

I had to wait a few more anxious moments for Laurel to come out of a restroom. Then I raced back to the gate and swam upstream against a throng of coach passengers, all of whom looked happier than first class me, stomachs being filled with meatless spaghetti and minds empty of concern about their wallets.

Luckily, my hip bag was right where I'd left it. Nothing else went wrong for a whole couple of minutes, aside from arriving at the rental car shuttle area a few seconds after the Alamo bus pulled away.

Once I finally got to the off-site Alamo center, I was directed to choose from any of the mid-size cars in their lot. Which turned out to be two identical gold PT Cruisers. This being one of those SNAFU days, I should have known that whichever one I picked, it'd be the wrong decision.

I drive to baggage claim to retrieve Laurel and our six pieces of luggage. We stuff them into the car. Then drive to the Kahului natural food store to stock up on healthy organic eats. Park. Press the "lock" button on the key fob.

And observe…nothing. Followed by more presses of the button that also result in…nothing. Laurel and I look at each other, panic bouncing back and forth between us (at least something is happening).

The Dark Ages beckon: a vacation during which each trip in the rental car begins and ends with – oh, dear god, the horror – a manual unlocking or locking of the doors.

Of all the SNAFUS we'd faced since leaving home, this clearly was the worst. I left Laurel at the store, made a U-turn, and drove back to the Alamo rental center. Pulling up on the street, I encountered an employee I'd met before having a smoke (though this is Maui, it was a cigarette) out on the lawn.

She fondled my keys, unsuccessfully attempting to open the battery compartment with her fingernail. "Often people take the battery before they return the car," she said. "Just return the car and exchange it for a full-size one."

Great.

Since the last mid-size PT Cruisers had departed the lot, now I'd be able to get a car better able to hold all of our stuff, including the countless bags of groceries Laurel was accumulating at that very moment. All I needed to do was transfer two large suitcases, two carry-ons, a boogie board, and a duffel bag with all of our beach/snorkeling paraphernalia.

No problem, if I could have pulled the old car up next to the new car. But a girl at the Alamo Returns Department waved me into the return line, even though I told her the car had just been used for a quick trip to the natural food store and back.

"You can pick out any full-sized car in that line over there," she told me. "Over there" meant halfway across the Alamo parking lot.

I asked her to watch the PT Cruiser while I started ferrying our crap to a different vehicle. She jumped onto the rear hatch compartment, where she contentedly sat during my three back and forth hauling trips.

First time over, I used what I hoped was a new-found car selecting intuition to pick a G6. I didn't know what a G6 was, but the name on the grill sounded sporty and it looked in good working order. I stuffed a couple of heavy bags into the trunk, then went to lock the car so somebody wouldn't rip me off while I made the next trip.

Shit. I'd managed to pick a replacement car that also didn't have a working remote, a fact that jumped out at me when I saw there wasn't any remote at all on the key chain.

So now I had to move bags from the G6 into a Grand Prix, which I picked solely because it was sitting right next to the G6 and I was getting way tired of playing with suitcases after a too-long SNAFU day. After a few more trips back and forth to the PT cruiser I was headed back to the natural food store.

Where Laurel had made a good start on the shopping, but it still took a while before we loaded umpteen bags into a pleasingly easily lockable car. I tore into the potato chips, a long time having passed since we feasted on those first class salads.

Check-in at the Napili Kai went smoothly, against my expectations. I was strangely pleased when the lot closest to our room was filled up and we had to hurriedly park in a handicapped space while rushing to move our luggage and groceries.

Ah, back to SNAFU normality. I felt even more at home when the first sound we heard upon approaching the door to our oceanfront room wasn't the surf, but loud country music.

It didn't go on too late, which pleased our jet-lagged souls. And so far today it's been country music quiet. I noticed this morning, though, that a guy in a room downstairs went out to the bushes adjoining the ocean, leaned over a railing, and spit an astounding spray of something into the greenery.

Then he adjusted his baseball cap, looked pleased with himself, and walked back into his room. I'm fearing that we're in the midst of some sort of redneck convention, though I haven't figured out why they'd come to Maui.

Fortunately, the island has a way of quickly erasing SNAFU memories. A few hours on the beach today, and a half hour swim in Napili Bay, got me pretty mellow.

That's what happens when one of the biggest chores of the day is framing Molokai between your knees.

April 18, 2008

For a moment I was ready to turn around and head back to the Fred Meyer photo counter with an angry demand that I be given my digital camera printouts, not the ones belonging to some old geezer who seemed vaguely familiar, but clearly wasn't me.

Except, after the moment passed and my mind jumped back to aging reality, I realized that he was. Me.

This is a new experience – looking at a photo of myself, or seeing myself in a mirror, and thinking, "Who the hell is that?"

Previously, I've thought "That doesn't look like me." But now it takes me a while to even recognize myself as me, the disconnect between how I believe I look and how I really look being so great.

I suppose this is normal.

Eventually, as the years go by, we pass over a mental image dividing line of some sort. On one side is the psychological person who has barely aged a bit; on the other side is the physical person who looks disturbingly old.

Like most men, and more than a few women, in many respects I'm still 18. I'm still immature and irresponsible. I still look at girls a third my age with lust in my heart (and other bodily organs).

The only difference from my teenage years is, I'm 59. Aside from that minor detail, and a bunch of lifetime experiences, most of the time I feel as young inside my head in 2008 as I did back in 1968.

That's what makes looking at photos of myself such a disconcerting experience. I try to avoid looking in mirrors, but when I want to rekindle a memory of my granddaughter's visit, and I'm in a photo with her, it's tough to avoid seeing the camera-reflected me.

All this is giving me a better understanding of why people, men naturally included, embrace plastic surgery, hair coloring, and other cosmetic improvements on what nature has wrought.

When the inner person is way out of sync with the outer person, some adjustments could be in order.

I doubt I'll go that route, though. One reason is my compassionate Buddha nature. I figure that the older I look, the younger my wife will look when we're together.

Plus, there's the tiger thing. I just read about what some people do in a part of India where man-eating tigers are around.

Since tigers prefer to attack from the rear, they wear masks with a human face on the back of their head. That way, the tiger attacks from the front, thinking it's the person's other end.

Now, it could be argued that if you're going to be jumped by a massive man-eating tiger, it might be better not to know about it until you feel the jaws clamping around your neck. That way the terror time is minimized.

However, like those Indians, I'd rather see the tiger coming, even if I couldn't do much about it.

My gray hair, wrinkles, age spots, and what-not are my tiger. The beast of aging and, eventually, death. I'd prefer that he wasn't stalking me, but he is.

So, I might as well face him head-on. Or at least, out of the corner of my eye.

This is in response to your recent letter expressing concern about the reported "starvation" of our dog. As you can imagine, I was more than a little surprised to learn that the Humane Society operates a Dog Psychic Hotline.

However, this is Oregon. Guess I should have seen this bit of woo-woo coming. (Except, I'm not psychic.)

At first I was deeply skeptical that your hotline could be picking up messages from our dog. But after reading the intimate details contained in your letter about my, um, bathroom habits, I became a believer.

From now on, Serena is going to be kept on the other side of a closed bathroom door. In retrospect, I should have been suspicious when she suddenly started to follow me around everywhere I went in the morning.

Regarding her ESP-conveyed complaints of food deprivation, please keep in mind that, despite her pleasant appearance, this can be a darn devious dog. Underneath her laid-back half-Lab personality is a semi-sinister German Shepherd alter ego.

I have attached a report from Serena's vet that says she could benefit from losing three or four pounds. Our recent efforts in that direction likely have led to the baseless claims of imminent starvation received by your hotline.

Here is my response to Serena's most egregious statements:

(1) "Forced to forage for my own food every morning." Give me a break. She voluntarily goes out with me to get the newspaper. Sometimes she sees a squirrel and runs after it. That must be what her malevolent dog brain is communicating to your psychic, who, in my opinion, is excessively gullible.

When we come in, I immediately go to her treat drawer and prepare her pre-breakfast. Currently this consists of five small dog biscuits (three different kinds – each completely natural, costing more per pound than our own food).

I carefully arrange these on a small towel, to minimize crumb dispersal, and lay it out on a corner of the living room rug. Upon calling "Serena, your pre-breakfast is ready!," she slowly walks over to the biscuits. (Perhaps these ten or fifteen steps also are what she means by "foraging.")

(2) "Often given grass for dinner." Absurd. She must be talking about the broccoli that I chop up and sprinkle over her evening meal. Which consists of the same cup of dry food and numerous spoonfuls of canned food that she got in the morning.

Our seriously spoiled pet probably is pissed about the reduction from 1 ¼ cups after we got the weight loss advice from the vet. I never would have guessed that she was keeping track of how much went into her bowl. But after reading about what she told you about my bathroom habits, clearly not much escapes her.

I note that Serena failed to mention what happens after she finishes her dinner. Allow me to fill in the gaps in her tale of gustatory woe.

Within a few microseconds of licking her bowl clean, our dog rushes over to me, tail wagging like crazy. We've got a little ritual going on here.

I walk over to the bowl, stare into its empty recesses, and intone, "Oh, my, what a good dog to finish all of your dinner. You deserve a treat!" I open the chewstick container and pull out a hunk of dried cow, anathema to my vegetarian soul.

Doing my best not to think about the karmic consequences, I make Serena sit and shake a paw, neither of which she does very convincingly. When the psychic transcribed, "Made to suffer horrible indignities in exchange for morsels of food," this must have been what our ingrate pet was referring to.

(3) "Always go to sleep hungry." Be aware that Serena really means "hungry for more." Before being put to bed in her own room, Serena jumps up onto a futon. My wife then croons dog baby talk while feeding her two large dog biscuits as a sleep-time snack.

I hope this puts to rest the starvation complaints you have received from our pet. I'd be interested to know what percentage of hotline messages received by your dog psychic turn out to be well-founded. In this case, for sure, you've been taken by a sneaky canine.

A 2004 U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) study found that 61% of American corporations, including 39% of large companies, paid no corporate income taxes between 1996 and 2000. Last year, corporations shouldered just 14.4% of the total U.S. tax burden, compared with about 50% in 1940.

While companies are getting off easy, thanks to loopholes, ordinary wage earners are getting stuck with the tab. The tax burden on individuals is expected to climb from $1.16 trillion in 2007 to $1.21 trillion this year, according to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), while corporate tax receipts are expected to decline from $370 billion to $364 billion. By 2013, the CBO estimates, ordinary taxpayers' bills may climb to $1.86 trillion while corporate tax bills drop to $327 billion.

Lovely.

I was walking down the sidewalk today, about to stick my tax stuff in a mail box, when I had the foresight to thumb through the stack of envelopes. No stamps on my U.S. Treasury and Oregon Department of Revenue payments.

Must have been a manifestation of subconscious resistance, since I'd stamped other mailings.

For most of my life I haven't been bothered by paying taxes. Government services are important. Much, if not most, of the time, government spends money more wisely than individuals do.

But that time isn't now, sadly. Not after eight years of George Bush/Republican wastefulness.

Deficits are soaring. Spending is way up. Money is being thrown down the tubes. The rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer.

And trillions of dollars are being spent on the invasion and occupation of Iraq. Three trillion, to be semi-exact. Close enough for government work.

Check out the Three Trillion Dollar Shopping Spree. See what your tax dollars could have bought, other than a war started under false pretenses and continued under massive incompetence.

April 12, 2008

Sometimes, well often, when I'm driving around un-beautiful Salem, Oregon, I look at the atrocity of Commercial Street, Lancaster Drive, or the shuttered stores of downtown, and think "Who the hell foisted this ugliness on us?"

It's amazing, really.

We've gotten so used to the sterility, car-centeredness, garish billboards, utilitarian strip malls, treeless parking lots, and people-devoid sidewalks of the typical American town, the monstrosity of it all has left us numb to truly noticing it.

The movie is about the rise of isolated cookie-cutter suburbs and the decline of creative urban neighborhoods with a genuine sense of community.

Now, we're not exactly poster children for the new urbanism. We live on ten acres five miles from the Salem city limits, sucking up fossil fuel every time we drive into town – notwithstanding our hybrid cars.

But someday, when maintaining our uneasy care yard and the rest of our property gets too much for us, I can see us comfortably settling into a condo or townhouse within easy walking distance of the necessities of life: a coffeehouse, natural food store, bookstore, parks, walking/biking trails.

"Subdivided" showed that lots of people much younger than us also want a lifestyle that isn't centered on a three car garage, a postage stamp yard, and fences (both physical and mental) that separate neighbors.

One striking image in the movie recreates the filmmaker's experience of suburban isolation. Here he describes it in an interview.

When I moved back to the Dallas area (after living in California), one of my first experiences with people in my new subdivision was when I saw this guy across the street mowing his lawn. I figured this would be a good opportunity to introduce myself, but as I walked across the street and the guy saw me, he turned and mowed his way into the back yard.

This is by no means something isolated to North Texas - during research for the film I learned about attitudes like this all over the U.S. in suburban residential areas.

Years later, it says in the movie, he still hadn't met his neighbors. To our neighborhood's credit, we're more tightly connected than that – largely because our development has a commonly owned area and easements for riding/hiking trails that meander behind most of the lots.

Architects interviewed in "Subdivided" point out that this is important: having a focal point where people gather. In suburbia, that doesn't exist. Stores are just a place to run into and out of.

By contrast, in the small town where I grew up, going to the grocery store was a social event. Almost always you'd meet people there who you knew well. Shooting the breeze was as important as buying the milk.

We've got some of that here in Spring Lake Estates, which makes our 1970's era development pleasingly different from most semi-rural neighborhoods.

A community lake and picnic area is our focal point. Laurel and I walk around it daily. Most of the year we rarely see anyone else, but during the summer children and families flock to the common property. Then, conversations are common.

Where is there anything like this in Salem? A public gathering spot that draws people not for a commercial reason, but simply because it's a pleasant place to be.

In college I spent a semester abroad, in a Yugoslavian town on the Adriatic Sea, Zadar. In the late afternoon and evening people would promenade along the seawall. I recall that girls would walk in one direction, and boys in another, for maximum meeting potential.

In downtown Salem youth hang out at the Coffee House Café and a few other "with it" spots. I enjoy seeing them in their black-clad, cigarette-smoking, body-pierced splendor.

Thank god, someone is on the sidewalks of Salem. I even enjoy being accosted by panhandlers; that's how boring downtown is most of the time.

Salem, like every American town suffering from the stultifying effects of suburban subdivisions, has a chance to come alive again. The riverfront area has the potential to be a gathering point now that the Boise Cascade plant is slated to be replaced by a mixed-use development and public areas.

Connecting with people. Disconnecting from cars. Getting out and mingling. Good urban (and suburban) design is pretty simple. We just need to do it.

April 10, 2008

I'm going to be sixty this year. I keep thinking that some sign of the "golden years" should have popped up by now. Instead, growing old sure looks a lot more like ashen gray then luminous.

Worse, it ends in black. Death. That's the worst part of aging: dying.

On the other hand, for some people it's the best part. They're so miserable from sickness, loneliness, pain, suffering, poverty, and what not, death is a relief.

For everybody else – those who want to keep on living – it's an unwanted intrusion into the pleasant pursuit of existing. Which seems a heck of a lot better than the alternative.

Faced with the need to choose a category for this post, I ended up with "Humor." That's how I'd like to be able to look upon death: as a joke.

The Grim Reaper is too tenacious to be pushed away. But by laughing at the bastard at least I'd get some satisfaction from not taking the S.O.B. seriously.

Some years back an acquaintance told me a story about how her husband died. He had a brain tumor. OK, bad news.

But the good news – no, the great news – was that the tumor was in a part of the brain that controlled his understanding of death. So he was being killed by a disease that took away his ability to know he was dying.

Dear Tao, give me that brain tumor when it's my time to go.

The woman said they'd go to the doctor and he'd be told a dismal prognosis, that he didn't have much longer to live, and it wouldn't faze him a bit. They'd leave, walk down the sidewalk, and he'd say "Let's get an ice cream cone."

His health was good until it wasn't. Then, bingo, he was dead, not knowing he was dying.

People tell me all the time, "I'm not afraid of death." I invariably reply, "Well, I damn well am." Geez, I couldn't even finish reading Michael Kinsley's terrific The New Yorker article, "Mine is longer than yours," when he started rattling off statistics about baby boomer longevity.

I got to that part just before going to bed. Didn't want to have death nightmares. So I saved it for the cheerier light of day.

In 2004, the most recent year for which there are final figures, life expectancy at birth in the United States was 77.8 years. That's 75.2 years for males and 80.4 years for females. But if you've made it to sixty your life expectancy is 82.5 years: 80.8 for men and eighty-four for women. (In Katha Pollitt's recent book of essays, "Learning to Drive," there is a vicious one called "After the Men Are Dead.")

Well, unless something untoward happens in the next few months, I'll make it to sixty. Kinsley's "But" sounds like it's supposed to be a preface to cheerier news. But come on: 80.8 years is just twenty-one more birthdays for me.

Laurel and I have been married for eighteen years, and it seems like we just got married a little while ago. Time flies faster when you're getting closer and closer to death (a cosmic joke that's becoming increasingly unfunny).

Here's another factoid from the article. When can you expect, on average, one person in your family or social circle to die every year?

With some heroic assumptions, we can come up with an age when death starts to be in-your-face. We will merge all sexual and racial categories into a single composite American. We will assume that there are a hundred people your age who are close enough to be invited to your funeral. Your funeral chapel won't fit a hundred people? No problem.

On average, half of them will be too busy decomposing to attend. As Max Beerbohm noted in his novel "Zuleika Dobson," "Death cancels all engagements." And why a hundred? Because it's easy, and also because it's two-thirds of "Dunbar's number," of a hundred and fifty, which is supposedly the most relationships that any one set of human neurons can handle. We're crudely assuming that two-thirds of those are about your age.

Anyway, the answer is sixty-three. If a hundred Americans start the voyage of life together, on average one of them will have died by the time the group turns sixteen. At forty, their lives are half over: further life expectancy at age forty is 39.9. And at age sixty-three the group starts losing an average of one person every year. Then it accelerates. By age seventy-five, sixty-seven of the original hundred are left. By age one hundred, three remain.

Me, me, me! It'll be me, one of the three!

That's the first thing I thought when I read this. The second thing was, Everybody my age feels the same way.

So, we'll see. It's a lot like "Survivor," one of my favorite TV shows. (For obvious reasons, I love its name.) Everybody schemes to make it to the final three, but most get thrown off the island before the finale.

Only difference is, in the game of life we all end up losing. Unless we can forget about the competition.

The last boomer competition is not just about how long you live. It is also about how you die. This one is a "Mine is shorter than yours": you want a death that is painless and quick. Even here there are choices. What is "quick"?

You might prefer something instantaneous, like walking down Fifth Avenue and being hit by a flower pot that falls off an upper-story windowsill. Or, if you're the orderly type, you might prefer a brisk but not sudden slide into oblivion. Take a couple of months, pain-free but weakening in some vague nineteenth-century way. You can use the time to make your farewells, plan your funeral, cut people out of your will, finish that fat nineteenth-century novel that you've been lugging around since the twentieth century, and generally tidy up.

Me, I'd prefer to not know death is coming at all. A flower pot could still make a sound just before it hits me. Sleeping and not waking up while still in perfect health: ideal.

April 08, 2008

Wow! Last night sleepy Salem became, briefly, a Tango town. Unfortunately, it was only within the walls of the Elsinore Theatre, where a touring troupe, "Forever Tango," performed.

Laurel and I took quite a few Argentine Tango lessons in 2006. We've forgotten much of what we learned. And watching the amazing dancers from our mezzanine seats made us realize that whatever we know about Tango is a tiny spark compared to the sensual firestorm they threw out.

If you feel that tango is just another dance, then this show may not be for you. But if it stirs your heart and makes the little hairs on the back of your neck stand up, then I think you'll find the performance a treat that passes in the blink of an eye or in the brush of a hand against your hair.

I found both the music and the dancing incredibly moving. Argentine Tango is like no other dance. Other styles strike me as part of life. Tango, performed as I saw it, is life.

But when a play has so much dialogue, and so little action, seemingly it doesn't make much difference whether the actors are sitting on stools with binders in their hands, reading, or sitting around on a stage reciting memorized lines.

"Copenhagen" is about a 1941 meeting in (take a guess) Copenhagen between two noted physicists: Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg.

Pleasingly, because I'm into this stuff, there's much mention of quantum physics in the play. In the 1920's Bohr and Heisenberg were central players in the development of quantum mechanics, one of the greatest scientific developments of our time.

Or any time.

The crux of "Copenhagen" is whether Heisenberg, a German, was working to develop an atomic bomb for Hitler.

Reflecting the uncertainty principle of quantum physics that goes by his name, we're never sure what Heisenberg's motivations are or what he really was up to before and after his meeting with Bohr – a long time friend and colleague.

After the reading the actors hung around to chat with the small audience (there was minimal publicity of the reading, unfortunately).

My comment was that I appreciated SRT's boldness in presenting a play in Salem that offered up questions rather than answers.

Too many people in this too-conservative town like entertainment that follows a typical arc of (1) problem introduction, (2) deepening of the dilemma, and (3) pleasing resolution. Such as, a dissimilar man and woman meet, their differences cause difficulties, they work it out and get married!

Boring. Yet emotionally satisfying.

With "Copenhagen," I told the actors, I started off not knowing what was going on and I ended up not knowing what was going on. Nice. Just like life.

The ending of the play leaves the impression that Heisenberg did his best to stall Hitler's development of an atomic bomb, via both conscious and unconscious motivations. Hence, he's a good guy.

However, one of the actors said that recently released correspondence from the Niels Bohr Archive leaves a different impression. Indeed, a 2002 article from New Scientist says that the uncertainty about Heisenberg's bomb making has ended.

Newly released documents show unequivocally that the renowned German physicist Werner Heisenberg was building an atomic bomb for the Nazis during World War II. The revelations, in letters and notes made public on Wednesday by the Niels Bohr Archive in Denmark lays to rest a controversy that spanned 60 years.

The unsent letters, written to Heisenberg by Bohr after the war, reveal that during a visit to Copenhagen in 1941, Heisenberg confessed to his former mentor that he was working on a bomb. Furthermore, Heisenberg told Bohr he was confident of success.

However, Wikipedia's take on "Copenhagen" is sympathetic to Heisenberg, interpreting the correspondence in a more favorable light. Some uncertainty continues to reign.

Proving (in my own mind, at least, where it counts) that synchronicity also is a fundamental principle of the universe, this morning I ran across a terrific Country Public Broadcasting System music video that mentions both Heisenberg and Bohr – along with lots of beer, pickup trucks, and physics.

April 04, 2008

Proving that I'm on the edge of senility and losing my better judgment, I fired up my Flip Video camera yesterday, filmed myself doing a couple of Tai Chi forms, and then uploaded them to You Tube after adding some Tango music.

This afternoon I had a locker room conversation at the athletic club with a guy I'd never talked to before. He told me about playing five games of racquet ball in a tournament against an opponent where he won a total of three points.

"Sometimes I love getting my ass whipped," he said. I told him, "Well, if you're out to lose your ego, this shows that you don't need to go to India or enter a monastery. A racquet ball court will do just fine."

As will the deck of a house, where what whipped me wasn't another person, but the difference between how I thought my Tai Chi looked, and how the video camera recorded it.

Sort of painful. But hey, I've been meditating every morning for most of my life with no discernible effect on my ego. So I might as well start trying uploading videos of myself to You Tube for the world to watch.

That's humbling.

Since I still have an ego, though, here's some exculpatory excuses to keep in mind if you take a few minutes (2:51 and 4:41, to be exact) to see my Tai Chi.

(1) I set up two lanterns to mark how far the camera angle went. The sword form, particularly, moves farther than that. So switch stepping was necessary to avoid disappearing and appearing from view. It took me several "takes" to get those new moves down as well as I did.

(3) I don't have any Tai Chi music, but I've got lots of Tango music. In my psyche I was moving to a faster Tai Chi beat than usual, knowing that I wanted to add some Tango'ish tracks from a CD a friend recently gave me.

(4) Lastly, reducing the quality of the video for You Tube uploading obscures the flowing perfection (in my own deluded mind, at least) of my forms. Any jerks and stumbles you see -- consider them camera artifacts.

Anyway, I had fun. And I got some insights into what I need to improve on. Take a look, and help with my ego-loss.

The first video is a Tai Chi sword form. The second video is the Cheng Man Ching (37) form, expanded to 38 moves with the addition of a Needle at Bottom of Sea near the end. (If you're a Tai Chi purist, blame my instructor, not me – he teaches the form this way).

For a little comparison, here's some video of Cheng Man Ching himself, the Tai Chi master who developed the form that goes by his name. I have to say that he doesn't look as impressive as I thought he would (just watched this video for the first time). But looks can be deceiving, on camera.

April 02, 2008

Usually I agree with Portland's Thom Hartmann, Air America's progressive talk show host. But this morning he kept saying that atheism is a religion – that not believing in God is a belief system.

That's ridiculous. It shows that no matter how smart and articulate Hartmann is, he's got some blind spots. Those logic-obscurers likely stem from his Christianity.

Not being a regular listener of Hartmann, I didn't know before today that he's a Christian. But he told a caller that he prays every day. And not to some universal being, but to a personal God.

This probably explains why Hartmann has fallen prey to one of the myths about atheism: that it is a religion. Over on my Church of the Churchless blog I regularly argue with commenters who claim that not believing in God is as much a belief as believing in God.

Huh? I point out that there is a huge difference between (1) not believing, and (2) believing, in the existence of something.

To assert otherwise is to engage in a form of sophistry where words don't mean anything. Sure, you can say that for many people "golf is a religion" or "watching Lost is a religion."

But this just means that they regularly engage in those activities. Like atheists frequently thinking, "I don't believe in God."

The author does a terrific job debunking the notion that atheism is a religion.

If someone asked you about unicorns, would you say "I believe there are no unicorns", or would it be more honest to say "I do not believe in unicorns"? These are two different answers. Nobody disbelieves in unicorns purely as a matter of personal faith.

Again, apply the same reasoning to the Gods of other religions. Example : if you are a Christian, do you believe the Hindu God Ganesh does not exist? Or do you not believe in Ganesh?

If you believe that unicorns do not exist, then may I say that you are a member of the "No unicorns" religion? Is it a matter of faith that unicorns do not exist? Can I come along to your non-unicorn church with you tomorrow?

If you are a Christian, do you believe Ganesh does not exist? Why, then you must be a devout follower of the "No Ganesh" faith!

Do you see where this is going? [ Sarcasm may be the lowest form of wit, but it's excellent for getting a point across. 8-) ]

If me not believing in your God is a faith, then you not believing in other Gods is an equal faith. How many Christians do you know who would say they do not believe in other Gods as a matter of faith?

If my atheism with respect to your deity is a religion, then your atheism with respect to other deities is also a religion.